The Face

right hand weighed slightly more than a Mercedes 500 M-Class SUV.
        If he’d been his father, he would have been surrounded by an entourage big enough to help him lift the stupid thing. Yet another disadvantage of being a geek loner.
        For lack of oxygen, his thoughts grew muddled. For a moment he believed that his right hand was trapped on the floor under a heavy shotgun, that it was a shotgun he wanted to lift, put in his mouth.
        Fric almost cast the device away in terror. Then in a moment of clarity, he recognized the inhaler and held fast to it.
        He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, could only wheeze and cough and wheeze, and seemed to be spiraling into one of those rare attacks that were severe enough to require hospital emergency-room treatment. Doctors would poke him and prod him, bend him and fold him, babbling about their favorite Manheim movies. The scene with the elephants! The airplane-to-airplane midair jump with no [126] parachute! The sinking ship! The alien snake king! The funny monkeys! Nurses would gush over him, telling him how lucky he was and how exciting it must be to have a father who was a star, a hero, a hunk, a genius.
        He might as well die here, die now.
        Although he was not Clark Kent or Peter Parker, Fric raised the gazillion-pound device to his face. He slipped the mouthpiece between his lips and administered a dose of medication, sucking in the deepest breath that he could manage, which wasn’t deep at all.
        In his throat: a hard-boiled egg or a stone, or a huge wad of phlegm worthy of the Guinness book of world records, a plug of some kind, allowing only thin wisps of air to enter, to exit.
        He leaned forward. Clenching and relaxing neck muscles, chest and abdominal muscles. Struggling to draw cool medicated air into his lungs, to exhale the hot stale breath pooled like syrup in his chest.
        Two puffs. That was the prescribed dosage.
        He triggered puff two.
        He might have gagged on the faint metallic taste if his inflamed and swollen airways could have executed a gag, but the tissues were able only to contract, not expand, flexing tighter, tighter, tighter.
        A yellow-gray soot seemed to sift down through his eyes, the slow fall of an interior twilight.
        Dizzy. Sitting here on the floor, back against the wall, legs straight out in front of him, he felt as if he were balanced on one foot on a high wire, teetering, about to take a death plunge.
        Two puffs. He’d taken two doses.
        Overmedicating was inadvisable. Dangerous.
        Two puffs. That ought to be enough. Usually was. Sometimes just one dose allowed him to slip out of this invisible hangman’s noose.
        Don’t overmedicate. Doctor’s orders.
        Don’t panic. Doctor’s advice.
        Give the medication a chance to work. Doctor’s instruction.
        [127] Screw the doctor.
        He triggered a third puff.
        A bone-click sound like dice on a game board rattled out of his throat, and his wheezing became less shrill, less of a whistle, more of a raw windy rasping.
        Hot air exploding out. Cool air going down. Fric on the mend.
        He dropped the inhaler on his lap.
        Fifteen minutes was the average time required to recover from an asthma attack. Nothing could be done but wait it out.
        Darkness faded from the edges of his vision. Blur gradually gave way to clarity.
        Fric on the floor in an empty steel room, with nothing to distract him but hooks in the ceiling, naturally looked at those peculiar curved forms, and thought about them.
        When he’d first discovered the room, he’d been reminded of movie scenes set in meat lockers, cow carcasses hanging from ceiling hooks.
        He had wondered if a mad criminal genius had hung the bodies of his human victims in this meat locker. Perhaps the room had once been refrigerated.
        The hooks weren’t set far enough apart to accommodate the bodies of grown men and women. Initially, Fric had sprung to the grim conclusion that the killer had collected dead, refrigerated children.
        On closer inspection, he had seen that the stainless-steel hooks were not sharp. They were too blunt to pierce either kids or cows.
        That’s when he’d set the matter of the hooks aside for later contemplation and had come to the determination that the room had been a suffacatorium. The existence of the